Level of History (LoH) in HBIM-T: A methodology for modeling and visualizing historical uncertainty in digital models of architectural heritage

This paper presents a methodology for applying the Level of History (LoH) parameter to describe and visualize historical uncertainty in Historic Building Information Modeling with a temporal dimension (HBIM-T). The research is motivated by the identified gap between existing BIM standards—such as Level of Development (LOD) and Level of Information (LOI)—and the need to represent source reliability and the degree of certainty in the reconstruction of heritage buildings. A five-level LoH scale is developed, integrating the hierarchy of historical sources with BIM model parameters. The study proposes principles for assigning LoH levels and their implementation through the extension of the IFC schema with a dedicated property set. A key element of the methodology is the integration of the LoH parameter with temporal modeling, enabling the linkage of certainty levels to successive phases of a building’s development. The results indicate that the application of LoH improves the transparency of HBIM models, supports the distinction between evidence based data and hypothetical reconstructions, and facilitates the interpretation and management of knowledge related to historical objects. The proposed approach operationalises an epistemological dimension within HBIM T by embedding source reliability and uncertainty directly into BIM element attributes and temporal phases. Validation is currently qualitative and design science oriented; future work will include empirical user studies and comparative benchmarking against existing frameworks such as LOK, GoG and Source Feature Matrix.